Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Four (Isaac and Rebekah)

In which Abraham sends a slave to make sure that Isaac marries a Nahorite and God makes sure that Isaac marries his cousin.

"Abraham was now very old," (24:1) but how old is very old? Sarah died at 127. At 100, she questioned her ability to bear child at that age. Noah died at 950, but that was right after God promised shorter lifespans.

Abraham gets his top-ranked slave (talk about a glass ceiling) and makes that slave swear an oath. Obviously, they didn't have Bibles around to swear by, so Abraham has the slave display his sincerity by placing his hand underneath Abraham's thigh. (24:2-4)

And the promise made? That the servant will not allow Isaac to marry a Canaanite. That the servant will return to the land of Abraham's origin and bring back a wife from there.

This is a good display of the kind of in-group selection and out-group exclusion that so much religion iconifies. This is why different religions and even different sects of the same basic religion don't get along. This is why Catholics decry Protestants who decry Episcopalians who decry non-denominational churches, and so on. It began in the Bible as a racial or tribal thing. Abraham doesn't want his son to marry an impure Canaanite.

But the slave suggests that it's unlikely a woman will follow him. After all, it's a very scammy-sounding thing. Imagine for a moment that you're a woman living in the middle east. One day a random slave claiming to be the servant of a guy named Abraham (who, by the way, was known by a different name, Abram, before he left his home) shows up, claiming the Arab Formerly Known As Abram (later known simply as ‽) has died. The slave asks you to traverse the desert to meet a kid who needs a bride. The kid, of course, will claim to be Abraham's son, but won't be able to prove it because Abraham is dead and can't speak, and may not even be recognizable what with the months of rot and decay that's eaten away at his flesh in the intervening months, and now you've been conned into marrying this Isaac dude with half his dick cut off.

The slave suggests that, given the above proposal, it's unlikely Abraham's last will and testament will be executed according to plan. The slave asks if he should instead take Isaac back to Nahor to pick up chicks.

Abraham declines on the basis that God has granted the entirety of the Canaanite land to Isaac's descendants.

So what's the big deal with him marrying a Canaanite, then? If it's all his land in the first place, why aren't the people therefore his people? Why not start a new breed of mixed race people and call them Isaacites?

Abraham makes a promise on behalf of God: "He will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there. If the woman is unwilling to come back with you, then you will be released from this oath of mine." He fails to mention that if the woman is unwilling to return to the land of the Canaanites, then God has failed, and is either not omnipotent or not willing to act on behalf of his Chosen One.

They complete their oath, and the slave takes off with ten camels carrying various goods. (24:5-9) A nonspecific amount of time later, the slave arrives in Nahor. He waits by the town well until dusk, hoping to catch some lady friend eyes there. He says a brief prayer asking for a specific dialogue to take place.

"Please let down your jar," he will say, "that I may have a drink."

She will respond, "Drink, and I'll water your camels too."

And with that, the unnamed slave will know he's found the right woman for Isaac. No, he doesn't need to know about the girl's physical beauty or if she and Isaac have compatible personalities or if the girl is already betrothed. He only needs a commonplace response to a commonplace question to know that this is the girl for Isaac.

And so it happens that a similar conversation takes place between Slaveboy and a girl named Rebekah. No, it's not identical. Actually, it's rather different by any legitimate standard of comparisons.

Slaveboy doesn't even start the conversation right to begin with: "Please give me a little water from your jar."

She responds, "Drink, my lord. I'll draw water for your camels too, until they have had enough to drink." (24:17-19)

She does as she says she will. Meanwhile, Slaveboy prepares a bribe of a gold nose ring and two gold bracelets. He asks who she is. She claims to be the daughter of Milcah and Nahor.

I rifled through pages to discover that this makes her and Isaac first cousins. Again, Abraham has gone out of his way to make sure that the family remains as incestuous as possible.

He asks to spend the night, offering the aforementioned payment, and she agrees to loan him some sleeping arrangements. Slaveboy somehow takes this as evidence that God has named Rebekah to be the woman that he should return to Canaan with.

Rebekah takes him back to her family's home and gives Slaveboy some food. He refuses to eat until she hears out his proposition, however. Rebekah's brother Laban encourages him. Slaveboy recounts the story of this chapter from the beginning, in about as many words (this part runs through verses 24:34-49), making sure to mention that Abraham is super rich because God.

"Because God?" says Laban and his father Bethuel. "Can't say no to God! Take Rebekah when you leave! Let her marry this half-dicked guy you speak of!"

Bronze Age desert nomads were evidently very gullible.

In 24:52-54, Slaveboy pays them off and demands that he and Rebeka leave the next morning.

But finally he meets some resistance. They argue for several verses about whether or not the paid-for whore gets to stay at home for ten more days before leaving. They eventually agree to see what Rebekah thinks about this whole thing.

She agrees to leave immediately because, as Kanye "Jesus" West might say, she ain't messin' with no broke niggas.

So they send her on her way, and say a little prayer for her in 24:60...

Our sister, may you increase
to thousands upon thousands;
may your offspring possess
the cities of their enemies.

How nice. They might as well have just said,

Our sister, may you fuck a lot
and have lots of inbred babies;
may your babies make lots of enemies
and then slaughter them all.

So Rebekah gets on one of Slaveboy's camels, and they head back toward Canaan.

They meet Isaac in a Negevian field meditating one evening. Rebekah covers herself as they approach because being seen by him is probably punishable by cactus rape or something. Slaveboy fills Isaac in on what took place (but manages to do it all in a single verse, 24:66, this time).

In the span of a single final verse, Isaac moves into his dead mother's tent with Rebekah, and they marry, and he falls in love with her (that's the cactus rape part), and Issac is now "comforted after his mother's death" (24:67).

A Modern God

God makes a lot of demands in the Bible. What to eat. What to wear. How to act. Who gets to live. Who must die. Sometimes, his demands just don't jive with what we as a modern society hold to be valuable facets of life. So I thought I'd take a moment to cover some of them from recent readings.

Chapter Eleven shows that God likes it when his followers are incestuous, or at least he doesn't mind. Sure, Abram doesn't marry within his own family, but other family members of his do. They're not punished at all for marrying their cousins. Nowadays, the miracles of modern science show us that reproducing with close blood relatives can produce genetic problems leading to decreased mental activity and retardation. A study from the US National Library of Medicine reports that in a group of 21 children of incestuous relationship, twelve showed genetic abnormalities (57%). Nine of those abnormalities were considered severe (43%). Abram was no doubt the product of several generations of incest, which could explain his numerous delusions and his honest belief that God would give land to the offspring that his wife is incapable of producing.

God also endorses lying. He never offers up any shame or guilt about lying to Abram, his chosen one, about his offspring's inheritance. These days, lying is considered a crime under certain circumstances. Perjery and fraud are two such examples, yet we swear people into oath before these very court cases on a Bible.

That's just something to think about when trying to bring Christianity into a modern context. Commonly, Christians claim to understand that the Old Testament is very old and that its relevance is slim, but all too often they seem to forget that much of their faith is based on these books. The ten commandments are there as is the creation story (both of them). A critical look at everything so far causes all of it to just fall apart.

Keep your eyes open in the near future for strange approvals of things like adultery as well.

Genesis: Chapter Thirteen (Abram and Lot Separate)

In which a fight between nephew and uncle is narrowly avoided by Abram being a generally cool guy, and in which God lies and lies and lies and lies and...

The first thing this chapter does is inform you that Abram and his crew have begun the journey home to the Negev, now extremely wealthy. They have an abundance of livestock and precious metals. (13:1-2) Abram "went from place to place until he came to Bethel". This is where, in Gen 12, he built the altar. Once again, he calls "on the name of the Lord". (13:3-4)

Lot, Abram's nephew, has been traveling all over the countryside with his aunt and uncle. His father, Haran (who is Abram's brother), died back in 11:28. In a way, I'm kinda glad that this crew is who it is. We learned from Gen 11 that people aren't afraid of committing incest, and I'm getting kinda tired of having to read about it. Sarai is not immediately blood related to either of her companions, so unless Abram and Lot decide to go at it, incest among these three is impossible.

In 13:5-6, Lot has some possessions that he's been carrying around, but he has to stop and settle because "the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together." I'm not sure what this means. And "I'm not sure what this means" is something I've said so many times by now that I'm not sure it holds any meaning any more. What's the problem? Is it that they simply can't find enough physical space for all of their cattle, silver, gold, and tents that they have to split up? There's no footnote here to explain what "the land could not support them" really means. Support, when referring to physical strength like I think this is, means the ability to assist and keep one on one's feet, but the land didn't just start caving in beneath them because it wasn't held up by enough support columns.

After deciding to split up, Abram's slaves who tend Abram's cattle start to argue with Lot's slaves who tend to Lot's cattle. Abram tries to calm things down by suggesting:

Let's not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, for we are brothers [Figuratively, not literally; they're literally uncle and nephew. -Ed.]. Is not the whole land before you? Let's part company. If you go to the left, I'll go to the right; if you go to the right, I'll go to the left.

That's redundant, but peaceful, and it brings us all the way through 13:9.

Lot knows that the land of Jordan has enough water to support his cattle's drinking habit, and they split up without any further argument. Lot heads into Jordan while Abram moves back into Canaan. 13:10 mentions that "This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah," which doesn't happen in my Bible until Gen 19, and I have no idea why we need a note explaining that something hasn't happened yet when we had no idea that whatever that thing was ever happened, and when we weren't going to find out about it for another six chapters. Way to go, Bible, giving us spoilers for yourself. Ah, it's okay. The best parts were in the trailer, anyhow.

Lot finally settles down near the town of Sodom. The Sodomites "were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord" (13:13).

Meanwhile, Abram is visited by God. God instructs him to

Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you."

Yep. Once again, in 13:14-17, God makes another empty promise. He says that the land belongs to all of Abram's offspring, but we know from 11:30 that Abram's wife Sarai is barren, and cannot bear children. If Abram wants offspring, either Sarai is going to somehow become fertile or Abram's going to have to sneak off and have an affair. Surely, since Abram was chosen by God to make this two-chapter-long journey, and since Abram is such a shining example of a human being, and since this is the Bible where God manages to do impossible things (that's called a miracle), I'm betting that Abram stays loyal to his wife and Sarai's uterus begins to magically work.

Abram believes God's lies once again, and he moves to live "near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron," and then he builds another altar (13:18).

Abram and Sarai's journey to the center of the middle east is a long one, and they've left behind them a trail of altars and diseases like some kind of twisted, Arab Hansel and Gretel. One way or another, God is lying to his people here. Twice in the past two chapters has God mentioned Abram's offspring, but never once mentioning how that's going to be made possible. And he's very long-winded, at that.

Genesis: Chapter Twelve (The Call of Abram, Abram in Egypt)

In which God selects Abram at random to be falsely rewarded for doing nothing, and in which Sarai is kidnapped into sexual slavery by the Egyptian Pharoah.

God begins commanding again right off the bat in Chapter Twelve. "Leave your country, your people and your father's household," he says to Abram, "and go to the land I will show you." God promises Abram that he will start a "great nation" and that God will "make [Abram's] name great." God "will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse" (12:1-3). God really is down with this whole vengeance thing. Aside from choosing people who marry their infertile cousins at random and granting them a legacy, he sure does like to tell these people that anybody who isn't nice to them will feel the terrible wrath of the lord.

So Abram takes off with his nephew Lot and his wife Sarai. They take all their things and all of their slaves (God doesn't seem to have a problem with slavery) and leave town when Abram is seventy-five years old. Or like, six and a half if you're counting in real time (12:4-5).

They pass into the land of the Canaanites until they finally stop at the "great tree of Moreh at Shechem." God offers the land to Abram, saying, "To your offspring I will give this land." (12:7)

Wait... What? *rifles through pages, finds passage* AHA! Genesis 11:30 says, "Now Sarai was barren; she had no children."

I'm having trouble reconciling what it means when God says one thing knowing that it means nothing. This is an empty promise. Abram will have no offspring because his wife is barren. She is infertile. She is not a baby-making machine. So when God says that the offspring of Abram and Sarai will inherit the land, he is telling Abram comforting nothings, probably to convince Abram to do something. Does Abram realize he's been taken? Did he just want a change of scenery and take the opportunity when God handed it to him? Who knows? One thing's for sure. Whether Abram knows it or not, God is lying to Abram.

Abram must not be aware of this because in 12:8 Abram "built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord." Then in 12:9 he moves on to a place called Negev.

When famine encompasses Egypt, Abram decides to spend some time on the African continent (12:10). I'm left to assume that he does so to bring some kind of aid to the Egyptians because the Bible does not provide a reason for Abram's actions. But he does have a fear of the Egyptians. He thinks that when they see Sarai's beauty, they will kill Abram to take Sarai for their own. He proposes in 12:13 that she pose as his sister (which is not too far off from the truth) so that this will not happen.

Sure enough, when Abram and Sarai show up, the Pharoah's officials think Sarai is worthy of presentation to their king. They take Sarai to the palace. The Pharoah approves of Sarai and thinks her "brother" is so awesome that "Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels." (12:14-16)

God takes pity on Sarai because of how unfairly she is treated by the Pharoah. The book doesn't say what kind of horrible atrocities are done to her, but one might assume sexual slavery. In 12:17, God "inflicted serious diseases on Pharoah and his household" because of it, fulfilling half of his promise from before.

The Pharoah, through his punishment, becomes aware of Abram and Sarai's ruse. He confronts Abram, reiterates Abram's plan back, returns Sarai to her husband, and tells them to get out of the country. Abram gets to take all of the cool stuff the Pharoah gave him. (12:18-20)

What's left unexplained at the end of this chapter is why Abram went to Egypt in the first place, and what he did while he was there aside from wind up in some wacky hijinks with the king. I understand there was a famine, but generally speaking, people don't move toward a place of dispair unless they are there to provide aid in some way. In a monarchy such as Egypt was, the people are going to get what the king gives them, and external help will be no help at all. Abram perhaps didn't understand this and went anyway. But while he was down there, he didn't do anything to that end. His wife got kidnapped, which obviously causes problems with the rest of the itenerary, and he spent the rest of his trip watching the Pharoah undergo various illnesses.

Personally, I think this chapter is nothing more than an illustration of God following through on something that didn't involve killing people. God did make a guy sick, however, and he did make a rather large empty promise to Abram. In the end, I'm still left making wild conjectures at why God selected Abram, what he selected Abram for, and why Abram went to Egypt. In literary jargon, God's selection of Abram and subsequent commandment for him to move about the countryside could be seen as a McGuffin, an event that takes place solely for the purpose of catalyzing an unrelated plot.

Genesis: Chapter Eleven (The Tower of Babel; From Shem to Abram)

In which God can't make up his mind whether to let humans live in peace or torment them endlessly, and people have sex with their blood relatives... Again.

Chapter Eleven explains that, since all people came from one ultimate source, everyone spoke the same language. Eventually, curiosity and exploration led to human settlement in a place called Shinar. (11:1-2) In the last chapter, 10:10 let us know that Shinar was one of the places that Nimrod the great warrior had settled.

The people of Shinar learned how to make bricks from mud and decided to stack those bricks, binding them with tar, to "build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." (11:3-4) To this day, man makes structures of such towering grandeur that one can't help but be impressed by them. It's part of human nature, I think, to try and make a name for ourselves, to prove that we can do these things which seem impossible. It's why we climb Mount Everest, even though it's a dangerous and often deadly task. It's the birth of tourism.

But God didn't like what the Shinese were doing (Shinese is my word, since the Bible doesn't give me a better one). God reasons in 11:6-7, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

What an ambivalent god! He can't decide to love humans or hate us! First he removes our ability to reason for ourselves and then gets angry when we eat fruit against God's better judgment. Then he blames us for it and casts us aside, making childbirth painful. Punishment! But then he decides we're okay, and that we should populate the earth. Great success! But then we commit murder and make babies with the Nephilim, which are either angels, giants, both, or neither, so God floods the world and kills all but about a dozen of us. Not just a slap on the wrist! But then he gives us rainbows and promises that he won't kill us all again, and he says it's okay to populate the earth a second time. Reconciliation! But when he sees that the humans that he created in his own image — that all-knowing, all-powerful image — are capable of building things, he wants to destroy it all and take away our communication. Waffling! God is insecure! How is it that he can make man in his own image and then expect us to not be capable?

So God, in his obvious wisdom, does exactly what he said he'd do right around 11:8-9, and humans quit building the city, which became known as Babel, which sounds a lot like the Hebrew word for confused, which is what I am right now. It seems adequate.

This double-feature chapter then moves on to some more lineage. Like an independent movie, we start with the climax and everything after that is boring build-up to something which already happened.

11:10-17 recaps what we were told last chapter: Shem's bloodline wound through the ages all the way to Eber and his son Peleg, whose name you'll remember means divided. So that's what it meant! Nobody was speaking the same language like they used to. The Bible has its time sequencing all out of shape. But what did I expect from a book that begins with chronological impossibilities?

These same verses also give us ages for all the peoples deaths and ages of spawning. On the whole, people are living less than half as long as pre-flood people, most dying around 400 years or so. (Are you counting? That's about 33 years old.) They're also having kids when their ages range from 30 to 35 years. (2-3 years old and already sexing up the ladies! Those horndogs! No, I'm not letting this go!)

So Peleg has a son named Reu, Reu had a son named Serug, Serug had a son name Nahor, Nahor had a son named Terah, and Terah had three sons named Abram, Nahor, and Haran. (11:18-26) Quick statistic: the person who bears children at the youngest age is Nahor at 29 years (2 years, 5 months).

Blunt as always, 11:27 lets us know that "this is the account of Terah."

Terah's son Haran "became the father of Lot," but dies "while his father Terah was still alive." (11:27-28) The other boys marry, and for once, some women are mentioned by name. Abram's wife went by Sarai, and Milcah was Nahor's wife. But just when you thought it was a good thing, you find out that Milcah "was the daughter of Haran". A brief thought will lead you to the same conclusion I arrived at: Milcah is Nahor's daughter-in-law. (11:29) Creepy! By now, there's enough population that humans don't actually have to resort to incest to continue the species, but they're doing it anyway. Nahor and Milcah share genes. Their children will most likely be mentally incapacitated. Sounds like Nahor and Milcah were, as well.

Because we needed to know this, Abram's wife Sarai was barren. (11:30)

There are two Nahors. Terah's father was a Nahor, and I'll call him Nahor I. Terah also had a son name Nahor, who I'll call Nahor II. Terah had two other sons named Abram and Heran. Nahor II married Heran's daughter, meaning he married his own daughter-in-law. Abram married his father's daughter-in-law. So that means Terah had a brother or sister we don't know about, and that person is Abram's aunt or uncle. The daughter of that person is Sarai. Abram married his father's sibling's daughter — his cousin.

This incestuous little family made their way to Canaan, but "when they came to Haran, they settled there." (11:31) This confuses things a little further because they came to what is presumably a town called Haran, not Terah's son Haran. Maybe Haran founded Haran, and they stopped to stay with family. This family is really close, you know.

Finally, after living what was undoubtedly a fulfilling life full of watching his daughter-in-law marry his son and cooing at the utter cuteness of his son and his granddaughter tying the knot, Terah died in the town of Haran.

Not until now have the incestuous goings-on in this book been so intimately laid out for us. It's not clearly laid out; I had to diagram the whole family tree to be sure I was reading it correctly. Perhaps this is intentionally done to disguise what was going on, or perhaps the marriage and childbearing amongst blood relatives was considered acceptable back then. Maybe that's why Sarai was barren. Maybe this history has been somehow tampered with during the centuries of verbal transference before it was ever transcribed to paper. Maybe it was further altered during translations. Maybe when King James decided things needed to be more to his liking, he asked for the insertion of some good, old-fashioned incest. There are countless things that could lead to the eventual bastardization of the language and the story and the lineage and genealogy, but this is the way it ended up, and this is what Christians believe. This is what Christians think God likes. Therefore, as a closing message, I encourage every Christian to go make sweet love to their cousins and daughters-in-law this year. Do it for Christmas. Mentally retarded children really are the gift that keeps on giving.